Simple (Dumb) LINQ Provider

Question

How easy would it be to write a dumb LINQ provider that can just use my class definitions (which don't have any object references as properties) and give me the translated SQL. It can assume the name of the properties and the columns to be same as well as the names of the classes and the underlying tables. Can you please give me some pointers.?

Answer 1

It took me about 4 months of fulltime work (8 hours a day) to build a stable, working provider that implements the entire spec of linq. I would say I had a very simple, buggy and unstable version after about three weeks, so if you're just looking for something rough I would say you're probably looking at anything from a week up to two months depending on how good you are and what types of requiements you have.

I must point you to the Wayward blog for this, Matt has written a really good walkthrough on how to implement a linq provider, and even if you're probably not going to be able to copy and paste, it will help you to get to grips with how to think when working. You can find Matt´s walkthrough here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mattwar/archive/2007/07/30/linq-building-an-iqueryable-provider-part-i.aspx . I recommend you go about it the same way Matt does, and extend the expression tree visitor Matt includes in the second part of his tutorial.

Also, when I began working with this, I had so much help from the expression tree visualizer, it really made parsing a whole lot easier once you could see how linq parsed to queries.

Building a provider is really a lot of fun, even if a bit frustrating at times. I wish you all the best of luck!

Answer 2

Give a look to the LINQExtender project, is a toolkit for creating custom LINQ providers.

Answer 3

Another option for giving you a leg up seems to be re-linq which is a framework for creating custom LINQ providers.

Here's the Source code and a nice overview (pdf) of what's involved in writing one.

Answer 4

I’ve written a tutorial series on my blog base on my experience developing a LINQ-to-SQL provider from scratch, starting with the expression tree composition stage (calling the LINQ methods), continuing with the expression visitor, breaking down of the query into components, parsing the where clause, generating the text and parameter and, eventually, compiling the whole thing into IL using the .NET expression namespace.

I’ve seen many incomplete posts that promised to explain how to write a provider, falling very short of the mark, barely scratching the surface and not actually delivering anything remotely executable.

The blog series I’ve written based on my experience has a sample project available for download with the simple provider that covers only the functionality required by the tutorial example. However, it also includes the production version supporting a number of operations (where, join, first, count, top, etc.), subqueries, nested statements, and etc. Additionally, it produces a cleaner SQL than a lot of what I’ve seen from Entities and LINQ-to-SQL. There’s no unnecessary/redundant nesting, wrapping everything in brackets and etc.

For anyone with a good level of abstract thinking, developing such a provider isn’t such a difficult task many set it out to be. I’ve developed one that’s used in production environment in about 3 months of part time work (meaning some evenings and weekends). From the get go it was aimed with performance and tidy SQL in mind – a goal it achieved.

It was a little hard to find the time to publish this material, but I thought – if it may help someone out there, there’s no reason for this experience to go to waste:

• How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 1 - Introduction
• How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 2 - Expression Visitor
• How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 3 - Where Clause Visitor
• How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 4 - Compiling Expression Trees

Answer 5

I have created a project 'LinqToAnything' which is designed to make it very very easy to implement a (simple) Linq provider.